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Monero. Its designed to be far less tracable than BTC and many exchanges exist online that trade XMR for BTC. I am surprised BTC still has this large presence i

Monero. Its designed to be far less tracable than BTC and many exchanges exist online that trade XMR for BTC. I am surprised BTC still has this large presence in the blackmarket.

arcticbull 6y ago
XMR has too little plausible deniability at the onramp and offramp, and is getting delisted from exchanges. Like any money laundering business the process relies on plausible deniability. Think Los Pollos Hermanos. Monero markets itself to criminals. Bitcoin to speculators and ancaps. You can hide your BTC gains by saying you made some leveraged trades in Malta. You can’t hide your Monero gains. Ironically it’s what makes it better at its job that makes it less useful. You really want to toe the line.
- kache_ 6y ago
  Blockchain analysis makes it extremely difficult to hide bitcoin. Not only that, but bitcoin in general can be blacklisted/tainted.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Honest question: does that mean anything on a DEX?
    - wmf 6y ago
      Ideally everything coming out of DEXes (and offshore exchanges) should be marked as dirty but that doesn't seem to be happening.
  - smabie 6y ago
    pretty easy to launder BTC actually using tornado
- vmception 6y ago
  You feel that way, but its not a complete reality. For more than half a decade many bitcoin invoices have actually been paid with Monero and we don't have a way to quantify that except to participate in forums where people talk about what they do. The merchants wouldn't even know if thats what happened. For every XMR.to that shuts down, another has already risen and is just waiting for marketshare. There are also trusted bridges between blockchains. And people are still working on trustless bridges compatible with Monero, which will really unlock its value and make exchanges completely ignorable. Ultimately the state will never accomplish its goal of strongarming the intermediary.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > Ultimately the state will never accomplish its goal of strongarming the intermediary. Wow it’s like reading 1984. The uh, first part of course, not the end. If you haven’t read it I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
    - vmception 6y ago
      A non-sequitur. Monero is compliant with all FATF goals. The state has gotten used to surveillance of digital transactions over the past 50 years by deputizing financial institutions, this was a temporary convenience for them and now digital transactions don't require financial institutions, which is simply a reversion to a mean with a millenium of precedent. For now they can strongarm the intermediary as they havent even noticed that they’ve just been taking a convenience for granted, but the reality is pretty clear: the state will have to deter whichever activities they dont like by actually investigating and stopping that person as regulating/strongarming the intermediary wont be a tool they have anymore.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Trust me the boundary between the shadow market and the real economy (where such systems would be illegal) is where the friction will always be and remain. Trade away, have fun, as soon as you try and convert to real money they’ll come down on you like the sword of Damocles fell. The only reason this isn’t more frictional is because the government has bigger things to worry about. They simply don’t care about you. The second that changes you’ll be trading in the digital equivalent of suitcases full of prepaid gift cards. This isn’t a new game lol, it’s been played to death and one side has a lot more experience than the other.
capeterson 6y ago
> I am surprised BTC still has this large presence in the blackmarket. The people buying goods online are not usually very tech savvy, so you lose a lot of potential customers by requiring a difficult-to-acquire cryptocurrency. Those selling the goods usually know what's up though, so they're still going to be doing the BTC->XMR->BTC->exchange swap in order to hide their identity. edit: You would be surprised how dumb some people are online though. Nowadays folks are a bit wiser, but the original silk road got taken down because they used hotmail, lol.
- Namidairo 6y ago
  > so they're still going to be doing the BTC->XMR->BTC->exchange swap in order to hide their identity. Wouldn't this just shift the risk to the exchanges who are now holding tracable proceeds of crime? To my knowledge, there is at least some amount of identity verification on the major exchanges, so presumably that they're fronting with stolen identity documents and the exchange is the one "holding the bag" so to speak?
  - capeterson 6y ago
    Mmm it's not too hard to get use a decentralized exchange to get cash overnighted for BTC sent to a PO box that was made with a fake name and cash. You can't really spend/deposit that cash easily, but at least it's not crypto anymore. Also, it's pretty much impossible to fraud Coinbase/Gemini/etc. since you need to hook it up to your bank account, right. Ergo, no one is sending BTC (even if it's "clean") to an exchange hooked up to their bank account. If someone is thorough it's highly unlikely that clean BTC will get them imprisoned, but the IRS might take a hefty cut that vendors of course would prefer to circumvent. Many vendors also don't cash out until they're completely clean, if they can afford to.

Monero. Its designed to be far less tracable than BTC and many exchanges exist online that trade XMR for BTC. I am surprised BTC still has this large presence in the blackmarket.

arcticbull 6y ago

XMR has too little plausible deniability at the onramp and offramp, and is getting delisted from exchanges. Like any money laundering business the process relies on plausible deniability. Think Los Pollos Hermanos. Monero markets itself to criminals. Bitcoin to speculators and ancaps. You can hide your BTC gains by saying you made some leveraged trades in Malta. You can’t hide your Monero gains. Ironically it’s what makes it better at its job that makes it less useful. You really want to toe the line.

kache_ 6y ago
Blockchain analysis makes it extremely difficult to hide bitcoin. Not only that, but bitcoin in general can be blacklisted/tainted.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Honest question: does that mean anything on a DEX?
  - wmf 6y ago
    Ideally everything coming out of DEXes (and offshore exchanges) should be marked as dirty but that doesn't seem to be happening.
- smabie 6y ago
  pretty easy to launder BTC actually using tornado
vmception 6y ago
You feel that way, but its not a complete reality. For more than half a decade many bitcoin invoices have actually been paid with Monero and we don't have a way to quantify that except to participate in forums where people talk about what they do. The merchants wouldn't even know if thats what happened. For every XMR.to that shuts down, another has already risen and is just waiting for marketshare. There are also trusted bridges between blockchains. And people are still working on trustless bridges compatible with Monero, which will really unlock its value and make exchanges completely ignorable. Ultimately the state will never accomplish its goal of strongarming the intermediary.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > Ultimately the state will never accomplish its goal of strongarming the intermediary. Wow it’s like reading 1984. The uh, first part of course, not the end. If you haven’t read it I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
  - vmception 6y ago
    A non-sequitur. Monero is compliant with all FATF goals. The state has gotten used to surveillance of digital transactions over the past 50 years by deputizing financial institutions, this was a temporary convenience for them and now digital transactions don't require financial institutions, which is simply a reversion to a mean with a millenium of precedent. For now they can strongarm the intermediary as they havent even noticed that they’ve just been taking a convenience for granted, but the reality is pretty clear: the state will have to deter whichever activities they dont like by actually investigating and stopping that person as regulating/strongarming the intermediary wont be a tool they have anymore.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Trust me the boundary between the shadow market and the real economy (where such systems would be illegal) is where the friction will always be and remain. Trade away, have fun, as soon as you try and convert to real money they’ll come down on you like the sword of Damocles fell. The only reason this isn’t more frictional is because the government has bigger things to worry about. They simply don’t care about you. The second that changes you’ll be trading in the digital equivalent of suitcases full of prepaid gift cards. This isn’t a new game lol, it’s been played to death and one side has a lot more experience than the other.

capeterson 6y ago

> I am surprised BTC still has this large presence in the blackmarket. The people buying goods online are not usually very tech savvy, so you lose a lot of potential customers by requiring a difficult-to-acquire cryptocurrency. Those selling the goods usually know what's up though, so they're still going to be doing the BTC->XMR->BTC->exchange swap in order to hide their identity. edit: You would be surprised how dumb some people are online though. Nowadays folks are a bit wiser, but the original silk road got taken down because they used hotmail, lol.

Namidairo 6y ago
> so they're still going to be doing the BTC->XMR->BTC->exchange swap in order to hide their identity. Wouldn't this just shift the risk to the exchanges who are now holding tracable proceeds of crime? To my knowledge, there is at least some amount of identity verification on the major exchanges, so presumably that they're fronting with stolen identity documents and the exchange is the one "holding the bag" so to speak?
- capeterson 6y ago
  Mmm it's not too hard to get use a decentralized exchange to get cash overnighted for BTC sent to a PO box that was made with a fake name and cash. You can't really spend/deposit that cash easily, but at least it's not crypto anymore. Also, it's pretty much impossible to fraud Coinbase/Gemini/etc. since you need to hook it up to your bank account, right. Ergo, no one is sending BTC (even if it's "clean") to an exchange hooked up to their bank account. If someone is thorough it's highly unlikely that clean BTC will get them imprisoned, but the IRS might take a hefty cut that vendors of course would prefer to circumvent. Many vendors also don't cash out until they're completely clean, if they can afford to.